CNN host Fareed Zakaria has been accused of plagiarism again.
Our Bad Media, the group that brought down left-wing Buzzfeed’s Benny Johnson before National Review hired him, found that “two dozen episodes of Fareed Zakaria GPS contain content that has been lifted without proper attribution or sourcing – including one he earned a Peabody for.” Zakaria’s November 2011 “Peabody-award winning special on education,” Our Bad Media noted, “lifts from the Washington Post, CNN, and McKinsey.”
In another instance, Zakaria repeated the introduction of a 2010 Dutch documentary on Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnistky word-for-word for a segment on his CNN show.
As Our Bad Media noted:
In 2010, Dutch filmmakers Hans Hermans and Martin Maat released “Justice for Sergei,” a documentary on the imprisonment and death of Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnistky. The film opens with narration discussing Magnitsky’s death and the events that led to it. In November 2011, Zakaria decided to run a “What in the World?” segment on Russia that focused on Magnitsky. It’s obvious that he’s seen the film – a visual from the movie appears behind him for a second during the broadcast. But what isn’t obvious is that Zakaria is literally repeating the film’s introduction, word-for-word.
The group mentioned that CNN’s editors noted their strict standards regarding plagiarism when it fired international news reporter Marie Louise Gumuchian:
Trust, integrity and simply giving credit where it’s due are among the tenets of journalism we hold dear, and we regret that we published material that did not reflect those essential standards.
As Breitbart News noted, Zakaria was suspended and apologized in 2012 for plagiarizing a New Yorker article, but Our Bad Media’s reports indicate that Zakaria’s bosses (most notably CNN and Time) may not have vetted his works after the first instance of plagiarism came to light. Our Bad Media has since unearthed a litany of examples in which Zakaria has plagiarized think tanks and mainstream publications like Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, the Economist, Time, The Financial Times, Christian Science Monitor and many others. As Our Bad Media noted, Poynter has reached out to many of the publications Zakaria plagiarized and “has yet to hear back from Norton, Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, or Atlantic Media on Zakaria’s wrongdoing.” Even Politico has noted Zakaria’s elite media allies have been strangely silent on the matter.
Our Bad Media edited the documentary on Magnistky and the episode in question “side-by-side in the video below, with credit to Fareed Zakaria for the idea.”
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